Sacred Country [Paperback]

I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy. Mary's fight to become Martin, her claustrophobic small town, and her troubled family make up the core of this remarkable and intimate, emotional yet unsentimental novel. As daring as Virginia Woolf'sOrlando,Sacred Countryinspires us to reconsider the essence of gender, and proposes new insights in the unraveling of that timeless malady known as the human condition. As Mary's mother, Estelle, observes, There are no whole truths, just as there is no heart of the onion. There are only the dreams of the individual mind.
Sweeping us through three decades, from the repressive English countryside of the fifties to the swinging London of the sixties to the rhinestone tackiness of seventies America, Rose Tremain unmasks the sacred country within us all.Rose Tremainis the author of seven novels, including the bestsellingRestoration,which received theSunday Express Bookof the Year Award in 1989, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was made into an Academy Award®-winning film in 1995.Sacred Countrywon both the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger in France. Ms. Tremain lives in London and Norwich, England.CHAPTER ONE: 1952
THE TWO-MINUTE SILENCE
On February 15th, 1952, at two o'clock in the afternoon, the nation fell silent for two minutes in honour of the dead king. It was the day of his burial.
Traffic halted. Telephones did not ring. Along the radio airwaves came only hushed white noise. In the street markets, the selling of nylons paused. In the Ritz, the serving of luncheon was temporarily suspended. The waiters stood to attention with napkins folded over their arms.
To some, caught on a stationary bus, at a loom gone suddenly still, or at a brass band rehearsal momentarily soundless, the silence was heavy with eternity. Many people wept and they wept not melÃu